# [D6:3M] Vision: [[The Academy of Forbidden Thoughts]] Hexagram: [[Sixth Hexagram]] Trials: [[Sixth Trial]] Symbols: #horse #waitingroom #blood #door #white #ghost #neédedEnemeA #moon #hood #TwoVersionsOfASelfsameLife #infancy #sun #car #wand #snowfall #darkwindow #game #mouth #eye November 20th, 1969 I. I demand audience with Magister Ludi of the Committee of Forbidden Thoughts. Her horse with she astride kicks me in the teeth. I enter into an ecstacy in the waiting room. The kick enraptures me, binds me, bloodies my mouth. It opens itself in me like an expanding dream. Through the door marked “Do Not” they exit. “Reveal your  face.” I hear the command  from behind the closed door.   There is blood on the face  of my wristwatch. I am enshrouded in white. Holes  for eyes and mouth. To see  and to smoke. To haunt, to  dream. What is the nature  of this dream expanding?  I watch the watchhands spin.  How kick ignites dream. To  feel and to know it like  the minutest heat of  dawn. Blood is not given to theory: neither to hers,  that I was born guilty,  nor to mine, that I was  born a ghost. Ecstacy of silent longing, the  vision of me that she  dost see is my vision’s  most neéded EnemeA. II. I find a pale moonlit horse between two gravestones. I mount it in the night. It twists its neck to face me, its hot breath soaking my hair beneath the gleam. I am ashamed. Beads rise  and drip down my face like  a hood of water. Horse  laughs at me and the dead.  I can’t remember how I arrived to this place, and, in fright, I begin laughing too.  Both Horse and Dead divine me. I am not free, not seen, only  invented and accused. Who is this buried here?  I resolve to forbid within myself frightful thoughts, the weird and fleeting, those categoriless intimations. I will be a force for goodness.  I feel my legs sinking into horseribs. I do  not want to be alone.   Penetrating my shame is Horse’s gaze. Now I  see the same name engraved in both stones, two versions of a selfsame life. One dead in infancy, one advanced in years. I cling to horse even as we  merge. I will be good. Soon, upon Horse, what is forbidden inwardly  forbids what can’t be in others outwardly. Wheat from chaff will be my task. To permit. To exclude. If I must, I whisper,  be fastened to you, then give authority to  my goodness. The good which exiles the forbidden. We advance to belong. III. Sunlight comes into my  car.  In the dusty air hover its wands that reach through the window.  They seem to loosen the threads of my bloodstained robe and hood. Specks of dust float in the light like dark snowfall.  I focus on minutest of shapes within and try to tug back.  I think I sense a response.  I lick my swollen lips, my horse- kicked lips. My day-old blood tastes of effacement. Gone is my hope of being permitted to matter in the world.  Yet almost as soon as I think it  does it ring false, shallow.   Is it truly the world that matters most to me, or just this game? It is morning, and it is strange to have slept in the car. Am I asleep or am I awake? My face is  warmed by the morning sun.  I have felt ashamed all  my life. I drove around  last night and then returned  to the parking lot of the Committee office. This is what I do each  night, and each morning I am again forbidden by what I forbid. For who is the Magister of the game I play? Shame  is the name of the horse  she rides, the car I drive.  What is each but either? _Who is the one in whose_ _parking lot the dark car_ _parks? And who behind its_ _dark windows waits? How still_ _is the night and how light_ _falls the snow? And how slow?_